Elevate Your Cloud Game: Expert Strategies for Cloud Native Operations

Welcome to a special edition of the "Cloud Collective Podcast," where we dive deep into the transformative world of cloud-native services and operations.

John Kundtz hosts this episode and features a conversation with Rishi Ranjan, a seasoned expert in Hyperscaler and Cloud Native Services.

Rishi shares his extensive experience in leading digital transformation initiatives and outlines the significant benefits organizations can realize by adopting a cloud-native strategy.

These include substantial cost reductions of up to 30%, increased predictability through automated operations, and enhanced flexibility and agility to accelerate cloud adoption.

In This Episode, You'll Discover: 

• The Significant Benefits of Cloud Native Strategies: Understand how deploying a cloud-native strategy can enhance your multi-hyper scaler operations, driving efficiency, cost savings, and agility.
• Common Mistakes in Cloud Management: Learn about companies' typical errors when managing their cloud infrastructure and how to avoid them. 
• Expert Advice for Cloud Optimization: Rishi shares invaluable tips for optimizing the management of your public cloud infrastructure, emphasizing the importance of a cloud-native approach. 
• The Future of Digital Transformation: Gain insights into the future trends of digital initiatives and how cloud-native platforms will play a pivotal role by 2025.

Episode Highlights:

00:00 Introduction to the "Cloud Collective Podcast" and today's special guest, Rishi Ranjan.

02:30 Rishi's journey into the world of cloud-native services and hyperscaler management.

05:00 The advantages of adopting cloud-native strategies for modern businesses.

10:00 Discussing the common pitfalls in cloud infrastructure management and how to overcome them.

15:00 Rishi's top recommendations for optimizing public cloud infrastructure.

20:00 Conclusion and final thoughts on the future of cloud-native services and digital transformation.

Want a Deeper Dive:

• Connect directly with our guest, Rishi Ranjan, on LinkedIn
• Explore

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Transcript

John Kundtz: 0:01

Elevate your cloud game. Expert strategies for cloud native operations. Hi everyone, my name is John Kunz and welcome to this special edition of the Cloud Collective Podcast. In today's episode, I am super excited to welcome Raji Rajan, an expert in hyperscaler and cloud native services. He will be offering essential insights for anyone who is embarking on the digital transformation within their organization, including addressing some of the common pitfalls and mistakes executive also encountered. Welcome to the show, Raji. How are you doing today?

Rishi Ranjan: 0:48

Thank you, john. Nice to be on your show, it's great to have you.

John Kundtz: 0:54

So before we get started, I always like to let the guests do a little bit of an introduction, share a little bit about your background with our listeners. You can start anywhere you want, but specifically tell us how you got into this. Cloud, native services, hyperscaler, management of infrastructure.

Rishi Ranjan: 1:15

Thank you, john, and hello my dear audience. I have around two and a half decades of experience in IT and leading driving the agenda of innovation and digital transformation. I have worked with a lot of multinational service providers, product companies, so on and so forth. I joined IDM kind of around seven years back and I am currently the director for public cloud and modern operations. I lead public cloud services offering portfolio, along with modern ops the new way of operations into a public cloud world and around two years back we were trying to innovate onto the managed services. And then that's where the whole idea of cloud native services evolved and that's how the whole story began. Excellent.

John Kundtz: 2:16

Yeah, that's interesting, I think, as we begin to see more of our clients and customers migrate their applications to a cloud one of the cloud native hyperscalers I think in our prep we talked about. That's great and fine for the application side of the business, but you still got to run the operations right, and so I guess my first question to you is what are some of the significant benefits for companies that have successfully employed a sort of a cloud native strategy into their management of their multi-hyperscalar operations?

Rishi Ranjan: 2:57

Yeah, john, I think that's a very interesting question. So when we think of cloud now, we are in an era of thinking of applications for the cloud, on the cloud and by the cloud. We don't think of those applications as a data center plus applications. If you really want to harness the cloud, we need to do cloud native services and cloud adoption majorly. Which is getting now and the customers are on the journey is how I can do cloud native applications.

Rishi Ranjan: 3:30

Now, cloud native platform what we have seen, and also to it by analysts, is at the foundation of over 95% of new digital initiative by 2025. 95% of new digital initiative by 2025, which is roughly up from 40% in 2021. So that's a huge adoption of cloud native platforms. So cloud native system enabled customers and business to migrate, modernize and optimize critical workloads on cloud environments by utilizing the well-architected framework of hyperscalars. But as we move these applications, one key component of the journey is to have an operating model that supports the deployment, scaling and operations of cloud native application. And that's where cloud native application platform management system comes, where it is like an operating system which serve as the basic underlying operating model that supports the deployment, scaling and operations of application environment.

Rishi Ranjan: 4:36

So just to have two benefits in a traditional managed service the cost of centralized tool infrastructure is roughly 30%, or if you move to cloud native, we don't need these external tools. So there is an estimated cost reduction by 20% to 30%. Just imagine cloud itself has become so mature that we don't need external tools. If you use cloud native services, we can save the cost by roughly 20% to 30% Cost reduction, I will say as one. Number two which comes to my mind is predictability.

Rishi Ranjan: 5:17

When we do this cloud native services, we utilize infrastructure as a code, automated operations, srv and those principles they come into picture. That helps in reducing the human errors and increase our service reliability. So my cost goes down and my predictability of the system goes up. That will be my number two and number three will be, I think, the flexibility and agility. As we know, no system can exist on their role in isolation and what this cloud native services helps us provide is very flexible integration and by increasing the use of native management services, say for monitoring, patching, backcub, security, we can onboard the customer at the normal cost and this protects our existing investment in the companies preferred tool through API-based integration with cloud native services as needed. So, cost reduction, predictability and flexibility and how it is helping all three of them. If I can summarize in one sentence, it is accelerated cloud adoption. By helping reducing the cost, by being more predictable, by being more flexible, easy to manage, scalable cloud environment helps us in adoption of cloud in a more accelerated manner.

John Kundtz: 6:45

Wow, interesting. The way I interpret that is that the organizations are let's say, the business units of an organization are deploying their applications in as cloud native applications on any of the major hyperscalers, and they're obviously doing that because they get a lot of benefits. But it sounds like what you're saying is, in some cases people forget that you still have to go and manage it in the back end, right, so you still have to still care and feeding, if you will, of that underlying infrastructure, albeit still in the hyperscaler world. And if you do it like you did it when it was in the data center, you're really leaving a lot of not only, as you said, cost money. You're spending more money than you'd aid to. It's going to take you longer and you're not going to be as productive and you're not going to be able to react as fast to the changes in the business environment. Is that a sort of a fair summarization?

Rishi Ranjan: 7:44

Yeah, john, I think that's perfect and yeah, you have said it. I think it's not only reduces costs, but it helps me making more flexible, more predictable, and my adoption increases Because now I'm able to see the cloud managed services the way they are. And, believe me, when we talk about managed services, we are talking about two and a half year, five year contracts, right, so it's not like you just do it and disappear. We have to live with that system for the rest of the contract of our developer systems, so they have a long kind of effect onto the whole idea of cloud adoption.

John Kundtz: 8:26

Excellent. So let's move on to the like. It totally makes sense to me, right? If you're going to be forward thinking on the application side, you need to bring that same sort of thinking onto the back, actually with the infrastructure management side of it. So I'm guessing a lot of organizations and I know you've got a lot of experience in doing this so what is some of the couple of mistakes or pitfalls that many organizations either fall into or obviously they should try to avoid to be successful in this strategy?

Rishi Ranjan: 9:03

So I think, based on our experience and learnings and adoption which we are seeing globally of cloud native services, I would say the attachability of the solution should also be thought of. When we start writing a solution or a platform or a framework, think of it in isolation, but in in customers world, in a real lab scenario, there is no one perfect solution. They may be having some other tools, they may be having some other methodology, they have their own framework, they have a wide variety of customer workloads, so how do you make your system attachment to all of them? So there is no rip and replace thought process. The adoption increases if I'm making my more attached to the existing customer realities of their own systems. So use a VI based integration, use modularity into your approach. When you're writing a system, think of all the layers in which you can inject yourself, because once this system gets kicking into customer environment, you will see a lot.

Rishi Ranjan: 10:11

Many people want to attach themselves for managed services. How do you attach them? That's number one. Number two is scaleability. We write these systems in a very ad hoc manner, but just imagine we are writing it for one customer environment.

Rishi Ranjan: 10:27

Now, seeing the success causing the reducing cost, more and more workloads are coming into system. It is getting used, or one type of application, the next type of application, the data, then AI, then JNAI. You can dream of all the applications which can float on top of it. How I can create this in a manner that I haven't spoke architecture. So I don't need to do a lot of stuff if I onboard customer. How I can make it scaleable. So attachability, scalability. And the third one is secure by design. Security should not be thought of as an afterthought, because cost of injecting a security is less too much once the system gets going. So how I can design the system so any workload which is coming is secure and compliant by design. I can integrate DevSecrets processes. I can enable audit, logging, cloud security, portion management. All the best practices should be there from the day zero itself. So my top three will be maker system which is attachable, maker system which is skillable and maker system which is secure by design.

John Kundtz: 11:40

So I'm guessing that some organizations don't do all that up front. Like you said, they address security but they do it after everything's been deployed and the initial management has been set up. The other thing I noticed is there's a reason why there are, I'll say, three major hyperscalers right, aws, as you are with Google, for instance because they all have different benefits, different architectures, basically based on your workload. One makes more sense over the other because certainly I remember, maybe five or six years ago, a lot of organizations said we're going to try and standardize on one particular hyperscaler and obviously that I'm very sure there's somebody out there that's on one.

John Kundtz: 12:31

But 99% of the people I run into have multiple public cloud hyperscaler services because, it's again, they're better suited for each, the particular application and which, I'm guessing, then means that the back end infrastructure management is probably different for each one because there are connected different. But it sounds like what you're trying to do is create an overarching framework that reduces the complexity, reduces the costs, makes it more agile and more productive for the team, if you will, that's managing that infrastructure. But obviously the secret in the sauce, I'm guessing, is that you can't try to take the underlying architecture on how you do, that is going to be unique to each one of the service provider or the hyperscalers, correct, yeah?

Rishi Ranjan: 13:35

The framework, the operating model, is cloud agnostic, right, but the actual execution is AWS specific, google specific and Azure specific. So think of it like this they are like when we deploy an application, we roughly use 1,000 to 1,500 cloud services. All these cloud services are very different from for AWS, for Azure and for Google, but the backup process remains the same. So the process of backup remains the same, but we don't inject different cloud services from different cloud providers to make it a cloud specific thing, right, but the underlying design, the cloud process, remains the same for all three of them.

John Kundtz: 14:21

So that sounds like to me what probably the biggest mistake organizations would make is trying to bring that tool set that they've been using in their traditional data center or on their on-prem or the private cloud world and try to apply it to each, exactly the same, to each of the hyperscalers, which I think is what you alluded to earlier, which is why you end up spending 30% more than you probably have to, and exactly, and that was the time when cloud services were not mature enough to answer these things and needed some tools to do that.

Rishi Ranjan: 14:53

But now cloud providers have gone beyond providing these services and we don't need these type of tools as heavyweights from day one itself right, and the tools is. The idea of tools itself is slowly fading away and providers are providing those services their own DR, their own management, their own scene alert. We don't need to buy most of the tools from outside.

John Kundtz: 15:19

Makes sense, all right, excellent. So one last question. I like this one, then we'll wrap it up. But so you talked about a lot of different things and definitely there's a lot of benefits, potential benefits. What would you, what advice would you give someone who wants to begin to optimize the management of their public cloud infrastructure? So how do you get started right? What do you do? What would you do next After listening to the show? What would you do next if you wanted to get more into this?

Rishi Ranjan: 15:49

So my opinion will be, I think, two or three things which I would suggest anybody who wants to onboard this cloud native journey. First, don't think of infrastructure support or support of some services. Think of a platform managed services. You're building a platform for developers. The idea of I'm building this platform for operations is slowly fading away. I'm building this platform for developers.

Rishi Ranjan: 16:17

So think of a developer and create a platform for a developer. Operations can be done, but developer is the prime customer person. I wish we could write these. She's our ultimate buyer or she's our ultimate buyer Right? So think of a platform managed services. What I mean? Don't rest it ourselves from the ability of the environment or backup or patching. Think of their secops, think of release, think of security. All these things are very much relevant to a developer, which can be done using this cloud native services. Second is it is automation and infrastructure as a code. Once the engineering skills within your own organization. Instead of engineers, instead of doing operations, we are doing engineering right, and that's the transition we all are going through. We are slowly seeing people needing these SRE skills, the engineering skills who can see a system and write some workflows and automation using infrastructure as a code, and do this cloud native services of integrations right. My two cents will be number one is think of a platform for developers to enhance our engineering and automation skills.

John Kundtz: 17:37

That's a great piece of advice, thanks, all right, so let's wrap this up. In conclusion. I want to really thank you, rishi, for a great interview. I always learn a lot, so I actually have one more question. So how can people learn more about what we just talked about and get started with this cloud native management? What would you suggest they put? We'll put it in show notes, obviously. We'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can get a hold of you and create a conversation if they have any questions or just want to learn more. What else would you recommend people maybe go to get started and learn more about what we just talked about?

Rishi Ranjan: 18:16

Yeah, as an organization, we are offering these type of services which can be digitally procured using our Kindle Bridge, so you can go to that website and learn more, procure more, enhance your organization capability of cloud native services. All these benefits are there, available digitally, which can be procured. Second I would like to say is go through some of these AWS, lco and Google best practices of cloud native services, because the world is changing so fast and we can only take what is relevant to our context. So look at these AWS as your Google hyperscalers and read about cloud native and see what is those 80% of the problem which can be done using that 20% of the solution. Once you do that 80-20 mapping, you can go to Kindle Bridge and procure the services that are ready made assets which you already have.

John Kundtz: 19:18

Great, and we'll put a link to the Kindle Bridge marketplace in the show notes, and it's a great place. You go directly to it and you can learn a little bit more of self-service basis on. There's white papers and case studies and things like that, and, if you so choose, you can schedule a consult with a subject matter expert. That's all I've got. I will tell you that there's a few points I think to remember. One is there's a big opportunity to save some money, particularly if you don't have to bring an existing tool set into the management world. Second, there's a productivity savings that you can bring both to you and your organization. And third, there's this agility factor where you can quickly react to anything that's happening in the marketplace. And the fourth thing I'd always say is you don't have to do this by yourself. There's lots of ways to engage organizations and service providers and subject matter experts such as Rishi, to help you, even if it's just some upfront consulting, and help you figure out where to go and how to get started.

John Kundtz: 20:28

This is John Kuntz. Thanks for watching again and thanks for joining us on this edition of the Cloud Collective Podcast. And just one last point you can succeed in managing and optimizing your cloud infrastructure management costs and being financially accountable and the predictability of the highly variable expenses of the cloud by creating an operating model that really engages enterprise IT finance and your business teams. Thanks again, rajee. It's great to talk to you. Have a great day.

Rishi Ranjan: 21:01

Thank you, john, nice talking to you. Bye.